Czech filmmaker Jan í…Â vankmajer is probably best known in this country for Alice, his full-length animated version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; but for a fuller sense of his achievements it’s to his short films that we should look, as this magnificent triple DVD box set from the BFI makes clear.
Review by Jeff Hilson
In 2006 during an interview with Mark Kermode for the BBC’s Culture Show, Werner Herzog was famously shot with an air rifle, apparently by a crazed fan – not that surprising perhaps for LA and, if the director’s own words are to be believed, not that surprising for Herzog himself. The occasion of the interview was the release of Grizzly Man, one of Herzog’s more understated ‘documentaries’ and I kept wondering at the time whether the shooting incident might not have been staged to give Grizzly Man some kind of notoriety, the kind of notoriety that attached itself in the early eighties to Fitzcarraldo which is now re-released on DVD, accompanied by Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a ‘making of’ documentary, to mark its 25th anniversary.
Review by Jeff Hilson
The same can by no means be said of Masumura’s Red Angel, which is a much more perverse though, for very different reasons, no less conflicted account of the plight of a nurse from Tokyo working in a series of field hospitals in China during the 1939 Sino-Japanese war.
Review by Jeff Hilson
After years of disappointing transfers which drained the original print of colour and used optical fuzzing to cover over the film’s frequent recourse to nudity, Jodorowsky’s legendary third feature gets a UK DVD release and we can finally experience, albeit on the small screen, the glory of his first foray into cinemascope.
Review by Jeff Hilson